On Saturday afternoon – we completed POST PRODUCTION on 11-11-11.

It seems surreal that I have completed another film!

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Asking one to believe in the Paranormal is a like asking a scholar to abandon common sense, and logical reasoning.

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It has been a long time since I have blogged about my newest film, 11 11 11…

I think after returning from Spain – I needed some time to just step back and get my head on straight…

Some of you, I am sure, were following my adventures in what I proclaimed to be the MOST HAUNTED PLACE I had ever been…

Some of you however called Shenanigans, and thought it was all hype…

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I was going to wait to post this blog upon wrapping the picture… But I couldn’t wait any longer to let you glimpse at my newest flick “11 11 11″.
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First off, shooting on 11 11 11 is going AMAZING!  I am getting killer footage, and I truly think this will be the scariest film I have done!

The more of these blogs I write, the more I begin to question my own sanity for writing them. I am at a point now where I am beginning to censor myself, because I feel that no one will believe the words I am writing.

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I have been told that making a movie is a lot like having a kid…

The emotions… The ups, the downs…

You birth this project – and raise it… It becomes a part of you… And then, at some point you push it out into the world, hoping it finds its way…

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There are times in my life that I feel like I am on PUNKed… There is no possible way that all the shit that happens to me is just some random happenstance… No, it cannot be ‘just one of those things…’

Sometimes I hear myself talking, and I call bullshit on myself…

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(if you have not already, check out PART 1 of this blog series here)

There are some things we experience in life that defy description… I can sit down at my computer – arrange some flowery words and hope that I make a modicum of sense.

The truth is – we EACH make up our OWN reality – what makes sense for me, might not make sense for you…  What scares me, might not scare you… It is what makes each of us unique, different, and individual.

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I am a horror director… to many, including my family, that means that I am sick in the head…

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have been asked…

“Have you been dropped on your head?”
“Did your parents lock you in the basement?”
“Were you abused?”

The answer to all the above questions is undoubtably… NO.

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Until this point in my career I have had the extreme good fortune of working not only in the same country but primarily with the same crew.   Every film I have done has been shot in Canada and, for the most part, I have had my same department heads since SAW II.
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Mother’s Day ended at 3am early Friday morning at it’s first public screening in Austin, TX.

As I walked in the lobby, I knew something was amiss as I saw some friends of mine, turn and hurriedly walk out of the theater.

My wife and I saw a good friend of ours standing by himself, someone who I had snuck into the sold out screening…

“Well?” I asked, hoping for a high five, or at least a thumbs up.

He looked at me, meekly shook his head.  ”I kind of hated it.”

My heart dropped… As I stood there, taking in his five word review – a critic walked up to me threw his arm around my shoulder!  ”Fucking BRILLIANT – Dude, this is your BEST FILM!!!”

A FILM DIVIDED:

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MOTHER’S DAY

Okay, so many, MANY of you have been reaching out to me screaming, “WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH MOTHER’S DAY?!?!?!?”

I have been screaming that exact question for months as well, and I KNOW what is happening with Mother’s Day. (I kid, I kid)

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STOP READING: First catch up on the previous blogs:
BLOG 1
BLOG 2
BLOG 3
BLOG 4
BLOG 5

My short film ZOMBIE was met with a cold, to lukewarm response… To me that was EXCITING as hell, as all my previous short films where UNWATCHABLE – the mere fact that ANYBODY was able to sit through THIS short film was nothing short of a success on my part…

It was also exciting to me… On a Thursday, I had no short film… On a Sunday I had produced, written, directed, and edited MY OWN short film.

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We are winding down here folks, only one more blog to round out the story! Make sure to catch up on what you have missed!

BLOG 1
BLOG 2
BLOG 3
BLOG 4

The phone rang in my shitty studio apartment early in the morning. I saw the caller ID was coming from Twisted Pictures – my immediate reaction was here we go… they are going to back out…

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First off, dear readers, let me apologize for not updating my “WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU IN FILM SCHOOL” Blogs as regularly as I promised… MARK MY WORDS I will update the next one before the weekend is out!!!!

However, I do have something VERY pressing to inform you about.  COMIC CON 2010.

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Originally I had planned on making this blog FOUR parts… But, after I started writing I realized that there was just too much to say… So I have expanded it into TWO more parts. PART V will be released next week, with a CONCLUSION to follow.

BLOG 1
BLOG 2
BLOG 3

So after 5 years in Hollywood, countless packages of Ramen Noodles, and many drunken nights of crying myself to sleep, I had a MUSIC VIDEO on MTV, and more importantly I had a REAL producer, who REALLY wanted to make THE DESPERATE, or so I thought.

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So, hopefully by now you have read my first two posts. If you have not… STOP READING and do a little catch up.

BLOG 1

BLOG 2

Okay, up to speed?

So… In a matter of months, I went from folding clothes to securing a lawyer and agents… (somewhere in between I directed the first stage production of the amazing smash hit REPO! The Genetic Opera)

I guess I was ignorant… Some would argue I still am ignorant. But I thought with my lawyer and agents in place my luck had turned, and suddenly people would give me the time of day.

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I had hoped that today we would be able to release the first ever trailer of MOTHER’S DAY, but alas, sometimes the world doesn’t move as fast as we want it…  My hope is we will have announcements within the next couple of weeks!!! For now, I hope you enjoy a couple of new stills!!!

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All great things, must eventually come to an end…

Today is our last ‘official’ mix day on MOTHER’S DAY.

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WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU IN FILM SCHOOL – part 2 / 4

If you are just joining in – Catch up and read PART 1.

Ok, so lets recap.

Dropped out of college – went to film school…

Graduated film school – moved to Los Angeles destined for greatness.

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WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU IN FILM SCHOOL – part 1 / 4

At least once a day I receive a message from a fan asking if I have any advice on how to make it in the film business…

Part of me wants to respond like Rob Zombie did in one of his interviews.  During said interview they asked Rob Zombie if he had advice for independent filmmakers.  Rob basically said, “QUIT NOW, if you are asking me for advice, you probably can’t hack it…”   Rob Zombies advice for filmmakers

I kid… I kid… but not really…

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I have tons of fans following me on both sites.  However, the majority of the people following me are not REPO! fans, but fans of the SAW franchise, or fans of the fact that they are ‘following’ a director.  The other percentage of people are industry friends, various horror sites, reporters, etc…

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So excited, today we begin the final stage of MOTHER’S DAY! The DI and Sound Mix.

This week, myself, the DP Joe White, and editor Hunter Via will sit in complete darkness and color correct the movie.

It’s already making such a HUGE difference to the overall mood of the film.

Basically, in DI which stands for Digital Intermediate – which gives us the ability to create looks that were just not possible when shooting the movie.  We have more control over color, contrast, saturation, etc…

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So – I have had about 10,000 facebook requests asking me if I plan on seeing REPO MEN this weekend.

The answer is simple… YES

This last year has been full of up’s and down’s- tons of drama surrounding trailer similarities, poster similarities, etc…

At times I let ‘drama’ get the best of me…

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Help me spread the word, that THIS weekend – it’s time to go back to the OPERA.
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MOTHER’S DAY IS OFFICIALLY PICTURE LOCKED!!!!!!!!!

Hell yeah!

What does this mean? Does it mean the movie is done… No… Not even close.

What this means is the PICTURE is locked in the place. All the edits are now concrete.

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Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the ONE YEAR anniversary of the Los Angeles shadow cast of REPO!

As always it was an amazing show – and I was blown away that after a YEAR people are still showing up in masses to see our opera.

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A BRIEF LESSON IN HISTORY:

December 7, 1941 – Pearl Harbor was bombed…

July 21, 1969 – The first man walked on the moon…

August 16, 1977 – Elvis Prestley died…

November 9, 1989 – The Berlin Wall fell…

The following year, 1990,  Vanilla Ice would release his opus of an album “TO THE EXTREME”

These dates are cold, hard facts… They are history… All one needs to do is go to any library or local search engine and you are provided with pages upon pages, of information commemorating these truths. I call them ‘truths’ as they are undisputed realities, backed up with hundreds, if not thousands of ‘proofs’ surrounding the events.

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That’s right. We have moved theaters.

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Mothers Day has been one of the greatest, and toughest challenges as a filmmaker. When I directed SAW 2, Mark Burg, one of the film’s producers, warned me about the amount of characters I had in the script. “It’s gonna be a nightmare to keep track of them all!” I laughed it off, shot the movie, and cried during editing – because he was right. There were a lot of characters – and at times, became a nightmare in post.

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For the last 6 years, any time I wanted to blog I used MYSPACE.  Even as recently as last month.  I knew no one was reading, hell, I am not sure if anyone is even still on myspace – BUT – at the same time I also knew I didn’t really have anything important to say – sans news about REPO showings, and what not.

But NOT TODAY… Today I actually have something to important to say.  Important enough that I finally decided to use this webpage I bought some years back…

We spend the first quarter of our life in various learning environments.   Preschool – Grade School – Middle school – onto High school… Some of us go onto college and further our learning… Some don’t.

In all of those years of education I spent countless hours learning random things that have NEVER come back to play in my professional life.  Yes, I guess you could say that when I dissected that frog in Mr. Beasleys 8^th grade Biology class it would help me when constructing  the autopsy in SAW IV when we dissected Jigsaw… But a HUGE portion of my higher learning has never come back into play.

So I have an idea I would like to propose… If there are any educators out there reading this, I beg you, I need you, I am enlisting your help… Please help me get a class on Movie etiquette.  We need to teach our kids now… Before it’s too late… Math, Social Studies, Science, Movie Etiquette.

Let me explain…

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